Story & characters
Borderline puts you in Gideon's shoes: a feared mercenary who survived his brush with Steve and now wants revenge on everyone responsible.
The Intravenous series has spent two games building one long, ugly revenge chain. Borderline is where it finally gets personal for the man who started it.
Who is Gideon?
Gideon is a feared mercenary who — in the developer's own words — "narrowly survived his confrontation with Steve". Once hired to protect a corrupt politician, he has lost everything: "What remains is a trail leading back to those responsible — and a simple, uncompromising desire for revenge."
If you played Intravenous 2, you have met him from the other side of the iron sights, and the Steam forums are full of players reacting with some version of "I thought I had killed him." You didn't. Borderline opens with him alive, patched up, and done taking losses.
The prologue's tagline is the thesis: Nothing left to lose. No reason to hold back.
The story so far, in order
| Game | Year | You play as | The one-line version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intravenous | 2021 | Steve Robbins | A man burns through the underworld to avenge his brother, killed by junkies |
| Intravenous 2 | 2024 | Steve and Sean | An unlikely duo — saving a life while paying back everyone responsible for Sean's situation |
| IV2: IV1 Remaster | 2025 | Steve | The first game rebuilt with the second game's toolkit |
| Borderline | 2026 | Gideon | The mercenary who survived Steve returns for everyone who wronged him |
| Intravenous 3 | Q2 2027 | Steve and Sean | Forced to survive a relentless manhunt |
Both parent games landed well with players: Intravenous (2021) sits at "Very Positive" with over 5,600 reviews, and Intravenous 2 holds the same rating across nearly 4,800 — as of early October 2026.
What Borderline adds to the story
The prologue tells its story across two full missions, and the developer positions it as "a proper taste of Gideon's story and the new gameplay systems". It does not reset the table — it sets the stakes for the full game.
And those stakes run both directions. In Intravenous 3 you play Steve and Sean again, now hunted: "Gideon survived. For everyone responsible, that was the mistake." The full game's story structure is built so that how you completed missions echoes forward — blast your way out of a job and the follow-up scenario can be a hotter, angrier version of the one a quiet run would produce.
Do you need to play the first two games?
No — Borderline is standalone and introduces Gideon on its own terms, and it is free, so the cost of trying it is zero. But the context pays off: the best way to feel what Borderline is doing with Gideon is to have seen him first as the wall between you and the objective in the previous game.
If you want the full picture cheaply: both Intravenous and Intravenous 2 are regularly discounted on Steam, and the remake gives you the first game with modernized systems.
